Recently, there has been an explosion in the market for very small consumer devices which are highly portable, pocketable or even wearable. Entering textual information into these devices, however, is a challenge. Because of their small size, many of these devices cannot support a full keyboard. Moreover, mechanisms which cycle through letter choices can be very slow and difficult to work with, especially for longer messages.
A natural way to enter information into such a small device is by using an electronic digitizer and some form of handwriting`recognition. A large number of different mechanisms for recognizing handwritten input on an electronic digitizer have been proposed, but most of these mechanisms require large amounts of memory and processing power (similar to the amounts of memory and processing power found on desktop computing systems). Such handwriting recognition mechanisms are ill-suited for small portable devices.
More recently, several handwriting input mechanisms specifically aimed at very small electronic devices with limited memory and processing power have been proposed. However, these systems require the user to memorize a particular alphabet (generally an alphabet of uni-stroke characters) which is different from the user's natural handwriting style.
Hence, there exists a need for a small electronic device that provides a handwriting input system which meets the processing and memory requirements and which allows a user to write in his natural handwriting style.